Maddie Politte-Corn is a third-year graduate student in Penn State’s Developmental Psychology doctoral program. Her research focuses on identifying neurobiological vulnerabilities that predict anxiety and depression across adolescence. She is mentored by Kristin Buss, Ph.D.
Maddie attended Cornell College as an undergraduate and in 2020 received a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology summa cum laude, with a minor in applied statistics. She attended Vanderbilt University for her master’s degree in clinical and developmental research, where she worked with Autumn Kujawa, Ph.D. Maddie’s interest in understanding the longitudinal risk factors for developing depression and anxiety led her to the work of Kristin Buss at Penn State. As a doctoral student, Maddie’s first-year project examined socio-contextual influences on the association between behaviorally inhibited temperament and social anxiety symptomatology in adolescence. Findings indicated high perceived support from peers and low support from family members increased social anxiety risk for adolescents at temperamental risk. As part of an NIH-funded TL1 training grant, Maddie completed a training fellowship in translational science, for which her research focused on identifying neurophysiological markers of social threat sensitivity and examining their associations with social anxiety and depressive symptoms in adolescents. To date, this work has resulted in two poster presentations, both of which earned student poster awards. Maddie has five first-author publications on the impact of social media use on adolescent and emerging adult mental health. In addition to her research with Kristin Buss and the Emotion Development Lab, Maddie collaborated with Katie Burkhouse, Ph.D., on an NIMH F31 submission to fund her dissertation work, which will examine neural sensitivity to social threat as a mechanism linking social anxiety and subsequent depressive symptoms across adolescence.
The Strumpf Scholar Award will be essential in supporting Maddie’s academic pursuits. This award will ensure she has the resources needed to purchase new equipment that will support complicated software programs necessary for her dissertation work. The funds will provide Maddie with protected research time and the ability to attend the virtual Statistics, Methods, and Research Training (SMaRT) workshop this summer. Additionally, the Strumpf Scholar Award will support Maddie’s collaboration with Andreas Kiel, Ph.D., at the University of Florida, supporting her training in time-frequency analysis for EEG data. The Strumpf Scholar Award will be pivotal to Maddie’s advancement and success as a translational developmental scientist.